He flicked his gaze in her direction. Red hair. The same blue dress she’d worn at Denham’s. All sorts of things flared inside him: desire and anguish and sheer delight that she was here.
He smothered it all. She could not be here. He could not let himself ruin her.
And he would, if she kept on this way. He would hurt her just by being near her.
Her mouth was at his ear. “I wanted to speak with you,” she murmured. “Come away with me, Christian.”
She trailed her hand down his arm and caught his fingers, and he let her draw him away from the table.
Katherine Montmorency’s card parties had been legendary for at least a decade. By this time of night, they usually devolved into revelry and determined debauchment. There were darkened alcoves and locked rooms, and every shadowed corner was hidden by a screen for privacy.
He let her pull him into one.
He almost couldn’t look at her. It had been twenty-four hours since he’d seen her in the park—twenty-four hours since he’d held his body a whisper away from hers, and imagined with savage ferocity how she would feel beneath him.
No, he could not look at her. He could not let himself want her that way. He did not know what to do.
“Why are you here?” he asked. He could hear his measured speech—the careful consonants of the inebriated.
He was too old for this. Too old for Matilda.
“I needed to speak with you after last night,” she said. “I—I came here to speak with you.”
Her voice—there was something wrong about her voice. He looked up, but her face was half-hidden in the shadows of the screen.
She sounded—
For the first time since he’d met her nearly a month before, Christian thought that she sounded afraid.
“I—” Her voice shook.
Shewasafraid. The tremble of her voice was acid, burning his skin. She was afraid of him—bright, fearless Matilda Halifax.
And that, more than anything else, decided him.
There was one way he could make her stop. One way he could persuade her to leave him alone, to go home and never come anywhere near him again. To keep herself far away and safe, where he could not hurt her.
So he put his hands to the curve of her waist, pushed her farther into the darkened corner, and hated himself.
“To talk?” he asked. “Or for this?”
He pressed his mouth to the skin of her neck, and as he breathed her in, some part of his mind realized that he wanted the soft floral scent of her letters. He wanted that familiar scent in his nose, in his lungs. Almost as much as he wanted to taste her.
It was not there. She did not smell like the letters.
“You think you know what you like,” he hissed into her ear. “But you don’t really know, do you? You cannot imagine, little girl, what I want to do to you.”
He felt her shudder, and self-loathing pulsed in him, so he gathered it up and used it to fuel the words he said next. He did not want to frighten her—and yet he had to—and he felt all his muscles lock at the confusion of want and need and hurt.
“I want to tie you to the bedposts with your corset strings,” he rasped. “I want to take my riding crop to your pretty little arse. I want to use you so hard you cannot sit down for a week. I—”
The slap she delivered was so powerful and unexpected that for a moment, Christian went blind.
He let her go. Slowly her image resolved in front of him.
His brain felt thick and muddied, his thoughts a slow, sticky revelation.
Her blue eyes were wide and tearful. The dim candlelight in the room flickered on her face as she stepped forward to dart around him.
